Scene-Stealers’ west-coast correspondent, Warren Cantrell, has been largely silent since his last SIFF 2013 dispatch. It should be noted that this is due in large part to the trauma he endured during that Film Festival’s screening of The Bling Ring: a movie that threw Mr. Cantrell into a frozen state of petrified shock from which the man is only just now beginning to emerge.
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Swaddled in the good graces of its literary source, Joss Whedon’s version of Much Ado About Nothing works in spite of itself. Whedon shot this black and white adaptation in just twelve days, and cast actors well known to fans of Firefly, Buffy, and The Avengers, making it a veritable Whedon reunion.
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The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray of Ingmar Bergman’s extraordinary 1957 film Wild Strawberries is superlative and serves an a perfect introduction to the director’s work.
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Two suspense thrillers new out on Blu-ray showcase two completely different approaches to what may be considered the horror genre. The term has morphed a lot since the late 60s/early 70s and the rise of the exploitation films, but both Stoker and The Last Exorcism Part II have what can be considered classic horror elements.
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The death of country songwriting legend Hank Williams has been the stuff of legend since it was announced on January 1, 1953. The Last Ride, a romantic “what-if” version of the story starring Henry Thomas as Hank Sr. is out now on Blu-ray and is interesting only as a cultural artifact.
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Ten years before he lensed the lush outdoor images of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Wexler directed Medium Cool, a fictional narrative that combined actual documentary footage of the riots and other lightning-rod political moments to explore the blurred lines between fact and fiction.
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Man of Steel is like The Dark Knight trilogy drained of all its moral complexity and vibrant storytelling. What’s left is an oppressive movie filled with a blaring seriousness, inconsistent production design, mundane conflict, heavy exposition and a huge amount of super-destructive action that leads to nothing.
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The espionage thriller gets an update with the release of The East. And let’s face it, born largely out of the Cold War; the espionage thriller needed a facelift. Pitting spy against spy and super power against super power just doesn’t work as anything other than a historical document or relic of the not-so-distant past.
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Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, examines WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, and asks a number of difficult questions about privacy, national security, and information access in the 21st century.
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Because This is the End has transplanted the egotistical and childish behavior normally reserved for Team Apatow’s lovable manchild characters onto the actors themselves, it feels dangerous.
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Zach Snyder’s take on the most iconic hero in history is a bit of a mixed bag.
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Truly, in the post-Sopranos era, it is a daunting task to do a mob movie, yet it’s one director David Rodriguez bravely tackles with his newest feature, ‘Last I Heard.’
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‘The Moment’ sets the audience loose in a world where images suddenly mutate and transform from moment to moment, and flashbacks that cover the same interaction change to something different nearly every time they’re is recalled. At the center of all this is Jennifer Jason Leigh, playing a physically and emotionally scarred war correspondent.
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Rock and roll photography is a delicate art, and according to the documentary Her Aim Is True, nobody was doing it better than Jini Dellaccio in the mid-to-late 1960s.
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The success of ‘Wish You Were Here’ lies with actors Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price and director Kieran Darcy-Smith’s thoughtful directing and visual choices, for the scenes all evoke a particular tone that seems appropriate to the moment.
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